Fallout Season 1 Review
Medium: Television
Release date: Eight episode full season released 4/10/2024
Review date: 7/29/2024
Score: 6/10
My main takeaway from the “Fallout” show was disappointment - disappointment in how the show actually turned out, and disappointment in how Bethesda (the video game developers and publishers who currently own the “Fallout” series IP) seems interested in expanding on that setting’s core ideas and concepts. As somebody who has played a number of the “Fallout” games, I was maybe always not going to be the correct audience for this show, as the season’s insistence on pure incredulity that VaultTec “might be up to something with the Vaults” for the show’s main plot only really worked if you’d never played a “Fallout” game before; otherwise, that plot beat would be an assumed given. Instead the show seems mainly aimed at people who were only passingly familiar with the series at best, with many of the season’s plot points, imagery, and musical cues being copied rather directly from similar moments from the games that inspired it. And I can’t speak to how those people may have engaged with and enjoyed the show, but I found the whole endeavor to be pretty lacking, and a rather shallow recreation of the audience experience of actually playing a “Fallout” game. The main story of Lucy trying to find her dad who had to suddenly leave the Vault just felt like the “Fallout 3” main story; the Ghoul and his role as a pre-war movie star just felt like the “Fallout: New Vegas Dead Money” DLC story; Lucy’s dad being a pre-war American cryogenically frozen and then woken up decades later in the post apocalypse just felt like the main quest in “Fallout 4;” the fusion chip feels like a reskinned water chip or G.E.C.K., and Lucy having to deliver said chip across the Wasteland feels heavily reminiscent of the “Fallout: New Vegas” Courier story; watching through this first season I felt my brain firing off constantly at recognizable plot beats or characters, but not in a fun “hey I know that guy” way but in a “wait I feel like we’ve already done this before” kind of way. It doesn’t help that the majority of the show’s plot takes place entirely in the season’s first and last episodes, with the show going from full speed in episode one to a snail’s crawl for episodes two through seven, and then back to a sprint for episode eight. Why there are throwaway episodes in a season where there are only eight episodes total is beyond me, yet “Fallout” season one has about three episodes I’d cut or at the very least heavily rewrite, which is an awful amount for a show that, again, only has a total of eight episodes! How are any of them a waste of time? And the show’s insistence in packing all its major story revelations at the end winds up making the reveals fall a bit flat because about 18 other big things are happening at the same time as it's the season finale, and so the showrunners have to squeeze everything into a single hour runtime. It's a bit hard to care at all about discovering the truth around Lucy’s mom when Lucy’s in the middle of her finding her dad, finding Moldaver, delivering the fusion chip, being attacked by the Brotherhood of Steel, being attacked by the Ghoul, learning about who her dad really is, betraying her dad, turning on the fusion power generators, abandoning Maximus, joining forces with the Ghoul, and chasing after her dad, all in a single standard episode; why the showrunners would back-end the season so much like this is also beyond me. Most of my negativity around “Fallout” is related to its plot and pacing, because from an acting perspective the show does a pretty solid job. I found most of the characters to be likable and engaging, with the exception of Maximus, but again my hesitation there is for writing reasons, as I thought the actor did a good job with the script he was given. The only real dud in the cast for me was Chris Parnell as the Vault 4 Overseer, but much like Maximus, I found my problems with him to be how his character was written rather than the acting - Chris Parnell just did his normal Chris Parnell schtick and it should have been on the showrunners to realize that type of performance wasn’t the best fit. Along those lines, I think the show does stumble tonally overall, plotting and pacing aside. The “Fallout” games do an interesting tightrope walk of goofy, 1950s era sci-fi and American culture that make up the ruins of the Wasteland, and the brutal deadly violence and bloodshed of the actual Wasteland. The “Fallout” games are able to accommodate this pretty well mostly by having the games’ minute to minute gameplay being the player fighting to the death with various Wasteland raiders and monsters, while occasionally stumbling across something silly in the story or environment. The “Fallout” show medium’s more limited agency means it has to try and recreate that tightrope with a set budget and only eight total hours of runtime for the season, and the end result is rather messy. A lot of the show’s violence seems excessive for the sake of being excessive (which is very “Fallout,” don’t get me wrong), but feels a little more out of place tonally as the show seems to hard switch between goofy American culture gags and people having their fingers cut off, rather than more gradually mixing the elements together. The show’s set design is very impressive, and besides a few moments of very noticeable rubbery CGI, I found the show’s special effects to have been handled well too; costuming was also a stand out, just great production work across the board.
But ultimately though, like I said, I was disappointed by “Fallout Season One” - I thought it was too short, with the story being too jammed into just the first and last episode resulting in the remaining middle episodes feeling like a waste of time more than essential parts of the narrative. The show never really rose above the “Fallout” games, even the middling Bethesda ones, and I can’t really judge the whole experience from the perspective of somebody who had never played the series before and wasn’t familiar with the setting. Lots of story elements like the Brotherhood of Steel or the NCR felt like they were included in the show because of name recognition and brand awareness enforcement rather than because they added to the narrative. And as much as I like Walton Goggins, he doesn’t really do anything this season, with his flashbacks to being a pre-bombs actor, while interesting and informative of what the US was like before the Wasteland, feeling kind of out of place and more like they’re to help the audience realize VaultTec is an evil company rather than to build up the character of the Ghoul through showing us who he once was. It's actually a lot of the characters’ connections to these pre-bomb elements, be it the Ghoul and his wife and kid, Moldaver as a communist organizer, or Lucy’s dad actually being a cryogenically frozen VaultTec middle manager, that I think hold the show back. I like Lucy, I found myself caring about Lucy, I have no issue as an audience exploring the Wasteland and its remaining factions through Lucy, but I couldn’t care less about Lucy wanting hunt down her actually a couple hundred year old dad because he helped nuke the capital of the NCR and turned her mom into a ghoul while posing as a Vault dweller as he flees to New Vegas in a set of Brotherhood of Steel Power Armor; its too much (especially since that entire revelation plays out in about 30 minutes of the season’s final episode). The show’s too busy trying to highlight every marketable and recognizable piece of “Fallout” lore and aesthetics to actually establish new concepts or ideas - you’re watching a “Fallout Greatest Hits” show and not actually something that’s going to move anything, be it history, factions, or technologies, forward. Maybe season two will turn everything around, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see even more series’ regulars crop up in it. At the end of the day, it's hard to care about where a show will be going when the show itself is only interested in where the series has already been.